BL. W. B. Yeats

62. Boyd, Ernest. ‘The Irish Renaissance—Renascent’. Dial 67 (1919): 53-55.

Boyd’s questions about Yeats’s ‘Anglo-Irish Noh’ remain provocative: the plays for dancers (see 17) ‘are the creatures of a mood  . . . definite evidence of a revolt against the mechanism of the modern stage. . . . Yet, while we may welcome any theory which seems to provide Mr. Yeats with the necessary stimulus to write poetic plays, it is clear that the drama cannot be restored to dignity by a negation of the material framework of its existence. . . . Where there are no playgoers to be bored by impossible plays, no dramatists to be subordinated to scenic effects, and no actors to interfere with the poetry of ideal speech, then we shall witness the euthanasia of the Higher Drama’. These comments are incorporated into a larger discussion of Yeats’s drama in Boyd’s Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (rev. ed., London: Richards, 1922).